“It’s really exciting to finally see it,” said David Dawson, co-chair of Cincinnatians for Progress, a streetcar advocacy group. “It makes a statement that this is about the future, but with a respect to the past.”

Mayor Mark Mallory officially unveiled the renderings to about 200 streetcar supporters, including mayoral candidate Roxanne Qualls, during a rally Monday night at Christian Moerlein’s brewery in Over-the-Rhine. The renderings were first reported on Cincinnati.com on Monday afternoon.

Supporters were calling Monday’s unveiling another big step for the $133 million streetcar project, which has been highly controversial and a hotly debated issue during the contentious mayoral race between former City Councilman John Cranley and Vice Mayor Qualls.

Cranley, however, scoffed at the significance of Monday’s event, which he did not attend. Cranley said it was simply a political move by Mallory to generate support for Qualls. Cranley continued to vow to stop the project if elected.

“It would be respectful of the taxpayers to put this show-and-tell on hold until the voters can have their say in four weeks,” Cranley said. “Picking the colors and laying a block of tracks before the election for a project that isn’t supposed to be done until 2016 is wasting money.”

Qualls was unavailable for comment.

Plans call for the 3.6-mile streetcar route through parts of Downtown and Over-the-Rhine to open in September 2016. Mallory told supporters CAF USA would begin production on the rail cars in New York next summer. The plan is for the streetcars to be delivered to Cincinnati in March 2015.

Some of the rail cars that ran on the city’s original streetcar system in the late 1800s and early 1900s were painted orange. The new streetcars will each have 32 seats with a capacity for 154 passengers and include space for wheelchairs, strollers and bicycles.

The unveiling drew loud cheers from the crowd, which also included City Council members Yvette Simpson, Laure Quinlivan, Chris Seelbach and Wendell Young.

“This has been a long, exhausting process,” Mallory said.

Mallory told supporters the city has asked the federal government for money to study expanding the streetcar route to Uptown. Qualls has said during her campaign she wants to expand the route to connect to the University of Cincinnati and the region’s top hospitals.

In August, demolition began on two abandoned buildings in Over-the-Rhine to prepare the site for the construction of an $11.9 million streetcar maintenance facility. Project leaders are working toward installing a small section of the rail tracks later this month.